The Rehab Men

Neal Jimenez Reaches For Your Smiles, Not Tears

May 10, 1992|By Clifford Terry, Entertainment writer.

When Neal Jimenez decided to write ``The Waterdance,`` a partially autobiographical film centering on three men undergoing rehabilitation after suffering spinal-cord injuries, he decided what he didn`t want it to be.

``I was very conscious of not wanting to make it maudlin,`` he is saying during an interview in a Near North hotel. ``The story was there inherently, and we didn`t want to make any grand moments. We didn`t want to have a scene where the music swells and the human spirit triumphs. You`ll notice that we also didn`t have any sports guys-which was another conscious decision. We didn`t want to have the cliche of an athlete who was cut down in the prime of his career.``

Unlike most of the other films that deal with the same subject, ``The Waterdance`` also contains an unusual ingredient: humor. ``It was a natural part of the script because that`s what I saw during my five months in the hospital,`` says the soft-spoken Jimenez, who is paralyzed from the waist down. A lot of the humor was pretty closely based on things that happened there, like the square-dancing club coming in to entertain. I think the humor is largely what sets the movie apart and makes it work. That, and the conflict in relationships.``

The storyline concerns a young writer, Joel Garcia (played by Eric Stoltz of ``Mask``), who breaks his neck while hiking and is treated in a facility that includes Bloss (William Forsythe), a racist motorcyclist biker who is convinced he`ll win a civil lawsuit, and Raymond (Wesley Snipes of ``White Men Can`t Jump``), a wise-cracking womanizer with marital problems. Joel himself, it quickly is disclosed, also has romantic problems of his own in his involvement with a married woman named Anna (Helen Hunt).

The film marks the directorial debut for Jimenez, as well as co-director Michael Steinberg, a classmate from UCLA Film School. ``I was the one who yelled `Action!` and `Cut!` `` Jimenez says with a smile. ``Otherwise it was a real collaboration. I wanted Mike to direct with me because the personal nature of the material required some distance.``

Opening Friday at Chestnut Station, ``The Waterdance`` won the audience award at this year`s Sundance Film Festival. Originally, Warner Bros. had commissioned the film, but ``they saw the script and I think they didn`t see enough of a profit in it.`` Eventually, the $2.7-million package was put together by producer Gale Anne Hurd, whose previous projects include

``Aliens`` and ``The Terminator.`` Says Jimenez: ``This is the first film she`s done without a gun in it.``

He started writing the script two years after his accident in the summer of 1984, when, as a 23-year-old film student at UCLA, he went on a camping trip in Placerville, Calif., with some friends. After they had left camp for a midnight hike, he stood on a rock which gave out from under him and he fell about 20 feet into a shallow pool; when his friends found him, his head was under water and he was unconscious. It took them all night to get him to a hospital. He had broken his neck.

``I`d used a typewriter before the accident, and it was traumatic at first to use a computer. The first time my fingers hit the keys I didn`t have the strength in them that I do now. It was frightening. But I knew there were ways I`d be able to do it.``

About 20 percent of the movie is autobiographical, he says. The sequence in which Joel and Bloss borrow the rehab center`s van and attend a strip show is ``a little wishful thinking.`` The hard-edged Bloss is ``entirely fictional,`` while the other supporting characters are mostly composites.

``Anna is not based on any single person. There was a woman who came to the

(Rancho Los Amigos) hospital for me every day, but we were no longer involved and she wasn`t married. I decided to make Anna married because it seemed to heighten the dramatic conflict a little more. At first, we wanted an older actress to play her, but we moved away from that idea after we cast Eric, and Helen was our first choice.

``Eric prepared for the part by watching a lot of the Three Stooges because that was sort of the prototype of how the guys dealt with each other in the ward,`` says Mike Steinberg. ``Soon after we cast him, he showed up at a meeting in a restaurant in a wheelchair, and wheeled through a big crowd of people; we were pretty impressed with his trying the wheelchair out. Well, he wasn`t just trying it out. He was there to stay. All the way through the shooting he transferred from the wheelchair to the car when he left the set at night, and transferred back into the chair when he got to his house. He wanted to be very sensitive to the perspective of the change that happened to Joel, and he really went beyond the call of duty.``

Jimenez easily recalls his own post-rehab experiences in his wheelchair.